Some random thoughts.

So, I've been having  a bit of a think. Some people consider what I do (systems biology) to be quite complex. It's not. Sure, some of it can take a bit to get your head around and it's not something you'd want to try and knock off in a spare afternoon, but once you get into the topic - not that complex.
Even if it was though, I think there is a general responsibility incumbent upon most academic work to be able to communicate the nature of that work to the public, especially if at the end of the day, they are paying for it. Thus doesn't mean dumbing it down, it means taking a little bit longer and putting a bit more effort into explaining what I do rather than using the language I would use to communicate with other scientists in similar fields. This bit, I've been confident of for some time.
The point is, that people are not dumb, the information they are getting is ... substandard at best. The NZ Herald's reading age is 9. That is, they expect a 9 year old of average intelligence to be able to read it. I'm not getting all dismissive of 9 year old's here, there are probably some quite clever ones about, but seriously, if the medium of communication between the politicians and the public operates at levels comfortable for 9 year old's, is it any wonder that there is a huge disconnect. People are also creatures of habit, if they only ever pick up the Herald, they are never going to expect anything better.
People can follow complex ideas if they are explained well. And the governing of a nation is a complex thing. Someone tells you the free market can solve it all - wrong, it's a complex economic system being shoehorned into a simplistic system. Someone tells you that tax is theft and we should just get rid of it - complex system, simple idea. Someone tells you the police are fascist thugs and if we just got rid of them then we'd all just get along - again simple idea trying to be made to fit a complex system. Yet try an explain an economic system as interactions between humans (rather than self interested rational actors) and I think people would listen.

Two things need to improve - the quality of the information being communicated to the public needs improving and the public need to get over the habitual instinct that a national newspaper can provide sufficient insight into how the  modern world works.  I read fairly widely, I think the information is there. it's not being provided though. The getting people to break their habits though - tricky. Short of setting up evening classes on how to find and read news with a minimum of effort every day, I'm not sure how one goes about this. Not that I'm adverse to setting up evening classes, I'm just not sure how to go about it.

If the communication is there, then public demand for better information will mean that the people who run around NZ pretending to be serious media organizations will either wither away or pick up their game. Either way, we stand a much better chance of people getting involved in the political process. Or at least I hope so.

Twisted election stats.

Bryce Edwards makes a point that everyone needs to remember. It's basic statistics, not that hard to figure out. National did not win the support of 48% of the population. They won 48% of the people who voted. These are two completely different things. The thing to remember is the low voter turnout. I don't think the numbers should be reported the way they are. Of the total possible viote, national won 33%, Labour 18.5% and the Greens 7%. What is truly scary is that the proportion of voters who didn't make it to the ballot box, 31%. The second biggest chunk of voters were too apathetic to get to a polling booth. I've seen a fe people claim that the day just got away on them or they ended up being to busy on the day so it wasn't really their fault they didn't vote. In a word, balls. I'll accept that if you're currently in outer Mongolia for an extended period of time, but randomly being to busy on the day - somewhat pathetic. This happens once every three years, it's not a big ask.
So, what do we do? I would imagine that some of the non-voters just don't connect with any of the political parties. How do we get the apathetic to re-engage with the political process? And I don't just mean voting once every three years. Being involved in the political process is more than that. I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. It's only in the past few years that I've actually started writing to MP's and public servants when they piss me off. I've only been to one major protest/march (the occupy one). I've always voted though and I'd like to think I'm getting better at being involved. At the least I want to get that 31% off their behinds and voting.
I'm thinking it's time that the don't talk religion or politics rule at parties was thrown out. Politics is important. It needs to be discussed when groups get together so that there's not a permanent echo chamber - most of my friends (I think) are probably Labour or Green voters. If they only ever talk to other Labour and Green voters, nothing changes. It's not so much that they need to talk to National voters, it's that we need to be talking to the apathetic voters, pushing them to take a stand one way or t'other and being appalled at people who don't. Politics should be to the fore of interesting/important conversations. I just need to learn not to rant when doing it.

And that folks, was an election. Barely.

Soooo.... how 'bout that election ay? I hosted a party on Saturday night, I hadn't specifically planned that it would fall on the same day as the election, it was just the easiest day to fit into various schedules. It was, I believe, generally well received. As I was pulling the incredibly unhealthy spinach dip out of the oven though I caught a general undertone running through the kitchen part of the party, I think I caught it when I was taking the chocolate filled chilli's out onto the balcony as well. It was, I think, an air of distracted, consternated annoyance. I could have been imagining it all though. Then on Sunday when I sat down with the dirty little rags that New Zealanders are laughingly forced to call newspapers and got a look at the results, it all came back to me. It was mostly as expected. National back in on the basis of no policy and no one liked the leader of the opposition. Banks sadly took Epsom, the only bright part of that being that ACT are now so diminished that he didn't get anyone else in alongside him. I'm beginning to question the rationality of the voters of Ohariu though. And seriously NZ, Winston Peters on 6.8%? What the fuck were you thinking? Seriously. And the whole stupidly low turn out? Pathetic.
On the left, the bright spot was of course the Greens finally breaking 10% barrier. The down side for me was that Mana got Hone in but no one else. I don't have a lot of time for Hone, nor for Minto, their number 2 on the list. Annette Sykes would have been good though. And as much as Sue Bradford polarizes idiots some people, I think she did a lot of good work when she was in parliament - the repeal of section 59 for a start.
Generally disappointing though not unexpected sums it up nicely I think. It's remarkable ho little faith I have in the New Zealand electorate at the moment. It would have been none but they at least kept MMP in the referendum, proving that they're not all entirely oblivious to the true nature of politics. Just mostly oblivious.

Public Idiocy

This is from a day or two ago. It demonstrates, quite well, the perils of opening your mouth in a public forum without thinking about what you are going to say. i.e. it's quite easy to come off looking like a complete tool. I'm not sure where to start on this piece of bollocks, I'm thinking I'll just pull a few of the gems out.
First out of the gate is the fact that billions (not one, many) has apparently been spent on maintaining and running the railways over the years. Which is just ... flat out wrong. No idea's where he's getting those figures from (though it barely warrants the term "figure", given how loose a number that is.
And given that it can't cope with hundreds of thousands of rugby fans in the space of a few hours, is obviously reason not to invest in it so that it can handle day to day commuter traffic <facepalm>.
Then apparently public transport is bad. See what happens in London when you have public transport - the unions get a hold of it and shut it down costing the city millions. Stop. Think about that for a moment. Think some more. Anyone else see where that goes wrong? If it's possible to cost the city millions by shutting it down for a couple of day - then it obviously enables those millions on the days when it's not shut down. 
The population density argument is an asinine one to make as well. If you take the total land area of Auckland and divide the size of the population into it, then yes, we're probably fairly low density. This assumes that we are evenly distributed though. Population natural accumulates around hubs, which is where public transport runs. We've got similar densities to other similar sized cities that actually have competent public transport.
Fair enough he likes his car's (apparently he's the heralds motoring journalist, feeling the need to dabble in politics) but I've never really got why the motorheads object to public transport. Surely the fact that public transport takes people off the roads would be a good thing for the people who actually like driving?

Thoughts from occupy.

Two articles springing from the occupy movements caught my eye over the weekend, both from Salon. The first, was a demonstration of excessive brutality from police at a UC Davis rally, followed by what I thought was a spectacular reaction from the crowd, seriously, watch the video at the bottom of the article. I seriously can't imagine what was running through the head the officer who sprayed a bunch of non-threatening protesters with pepper spray. They posed no physical threat, the only thing that I can think of was that he wasn't thinking of them as human. The police dragged the protesters away and were surrounded by a crowd chanting "shame on you". Again no violence threatened and the police slowly backed away. I don't imagine anyone becomes a police officer because of the pay or the glamour, there has to be at least a glimmer of the public service ideal in there somewhere. I can only hope there was a glimmer of realisation in those officers heads that after what one of their senior officers did unthinkingly, that the public they hoped to serves regards them with scorn and disdain.

The other article was written by an American soldier currently serving in Afghanistan. It resonated more with me becuase I've been tring to figure out what the occupy movements next step is. What the soldier is asking for - a citizenry that cares, that is involved with the running of the country and takes the time to understand what is going on - is something that would fix a significant chunk of the worlds problems. Again though, it identifies what we are aiming at, not how to get there. Occupy, as best I can tell, was, in it's first phase, an effort to get the conversation started. "Hi, we're sick of this shit, how do we fix it". Which was/is necessary. I'm sure there will be later phases, but it can't be limited to just continuing to protest. if it remains as just a protest it leaves the ultimate responsibility to fix the problems with the ones who created them. And while those who created the problems might make minor course changes and spruce up the window dressing, they are not going to freely relinquish the position of power they have placed themselves in. So something more has to come of the occupy movement as time goes on. It could very well be that the people on some of the camps have come up with brilliant solutions. if they have though, they haven't been communicated to the general public.
Basically, I don't think the next thing that comes out of the occupy movement is some wonderful new political manoeuvre. Sure, there are problems with our economic and political systems, and we need to start putting suggestions forward for fixing them (Even I've got ideas for these, flawed to be sure, but ideas nonetheless). The major thing we need though is for the population to become engaged. Not just to vote, but to read, to figure out how they are governed and how to participate in that process. Of all the things that are broken in our systems, I think this is the biggest.

Poor poor farmers.

I've always found it odd that farmers tend top side with the party that's big on the whole free market idea. Not that I can see them being particularly chummy with Labour either mind. The user-pays proposal that Labour is fronting at the moment, is something that I can see National gleefully bringing in for pretty much any sector other than farmers. Which is odd. Farms are after all, businesses. Which means they should be incurring the costs associated with running that business. Farmers might not have much in the way of ready cash, but I doubt there's many of them that are actually poor. It's like the capital gains thing - if you own a house, especially if you own an investment property, you are pretty much by definition rich. Everyone who is rich seems to forget that being rich doesn't necessarily mean that you have lots of money floating around, it means that you own a significant amount of capital. If you can't find the cash to live day to day then you are managing your wealth wrong and you need to rearrange your finances (sell something, invest elsewhere etc).
If a business is using a public resource, they should be paying for it. Quite possibly some would go broke, but I'm fairly sure that's one of the tenets of free market economics - that non-viable businesses should be allowed to go under. Not that that's been allowed to happen much, look at the huge tax breaks that mediaworks got or the guarantees the government put behind the investment companies.
And it's here, for me, where the disconnect kicks in. The market is supposedly the best mechanism for making things efficient. Leaving aside the arguments that markets are not necessarily the best at making things efficient if that economics were the be all and end all of life (which they're not), then why should the principles of market economies be applied to government ministries and government owned companies, but not to actual companies, where economics are the primary motivator?

A soupcon of leadership.

Phil Goff should take note, this is how a leader should deal with idiots in their ranks. Own up. Norman denies any involvement of the Greens in the defacing of Nationals billboards. He then finds out that one of them did. Rather than waiting for someone to find out he punishes the idiot that did it and then owns up, showing the electorate that he has dealt with it.
I don't by the way, disagree with the sentiments expressed by the additions to Nationals billboards. If it was a random member of the public, it's still probably illegal, but most people will wave it off. If you are in anyway connected with on opposition party, especially a smaller one trying to establish itself, you'd have to be a sodding idiot to be involved. When caught it potentially damages the cause they're trying to further. I hereby find Russell Normans actions acceptable.

Autism in the womb?

Autism is a disorder that I find quite intriguing, though I think I'm more interested in what is wrong rather than how things gets broken in the first place. It's part of a spectrum of disorders, I'm sure everyone's heard of Aspergers syndrome, a less severe psychological condition on the same spectrum - a lot of geeky people can to a limited degree, identify with some of the associated traits which I suspect leads to a significant amount of self-mis-diagnosis.
We don't know what causes autism, or even exactly what is going wrong in the brain. Some people who are willing to discount all the evidence to the contrary claim it's vaccines, but it takes a significant amount of wilful blindness to believe that these days. This study  doesn't identify a cause. It does however give us a clue as to what might be wrong. It's done on a very small sample size, which is understandable - it's looking at neuron concentrations in certain regions of the brain, which means that you have to wait until people die (making it quite a sad research project as well). Basically though, there are increased concentrations of neurons in a part of the brain that deals with language, social development and emotions. When our body develops, there's actually quite a lot of cells dying. For example, we don't grow fingers, we grow a paddle and the cells between our fingers then die off. When our brains are developing, there's something similar happening. There are a bunch of neurons that are used as a scaffold for other parts of the brain, which are then meant to die off. If these aren't dying then they could be contributing to the excessive neuron density and thus preventing the all of the neurons that would normally be there from integrating properly.

Lignite - because the atmosphere needs more carbon.

A while ago, I can't remember where, Jeanette Fitzsimmons, the ex-leader of the Green party pointed out on of the problems with an emissions trading scheme. Primarily that if you allow business to trade back and forth, it doesn't necessarily stop more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere. It was relevant at the time because Solid Energy was in the news with their plans of turning a whole bunch of lignite (really, really low quality coal) into fuel. Businesses can buy and sell credits so as to be able to use this coal, but either way, if it goes ahead, it will still be taking more carbon out of the ground and putting more into the atmosphere and oceans. Any serious environmental policy needs to be directing the development of sustainable power sources, rather than tacitly condone the extraction of more carbon. It's nice to see that the Labour party have finally acknowledged that. The Greens have been banging this drum for ages now though and this one of the areas I actually fully agree them. National sadly still think we've got time for a nice quiet, don't startle the horses (business) approach. So, so wrong.

Friday.

Morning all. It's Friday. I've spent most of the day in the lab and I'm a bit tired and down anyway. So I offer this instead.

I'm not saying all modern art is pants, but I think there's a reasonable demonstration of why I'm not fond of chunks of it in the last 30 seconds. the first couple of minutes - loverly, the last 30 seconds or so, not so much. There is an element of bias in that statement though - the art that's been around longer is the usually the good stuff, the not so good having been dropped by the wayside. Which is why modern culture is quite often presented as crap by curmudgeons - they've forgotten all the crap stuff and are only remmebering the gems.
I still don't like the last 30 seconds though.

Capitalism - modified.

I came across the Mondragon corporation for the first time this morning via an article on Salon. The article on Salon started off, quite rightly noting that it is possible to criticize capitalism while still celebrating aspects of it. It's still possible to acknowledge that some people (like Steve Jobs) did a lot and probably deserve spectacular remuneration. William Buckley (conservative - he thought the republicans were a bit wishy washy, back when the republicans weren't bat shit insane) thoroughly agreed, and used Thomas Edison as an example. When people create wonderful things, you give them credit (I'm not going to get started on Denis Ritchie here). Buckley also worried that the excessive sums corporate executives were getting - despite in many cases destroying wealth rather than creating anything, would end up damaging capitalism. On current evidence, you'd probably have to agree that he was right.
Which brings us to the Mondragon corporation in Basque, Spain. It's a corporation owned by it's employees. Typical hippie behaviour nothing special you might say. This one corporation owns 256 companies. Each of which is owned by it's employees - 83,000 of them in total. As a whole it turns over 14 billion Euro a year. That, is not a hippie commune running a vegetable garden. I'm intrigued as to how it all works. One eminently sensible bit it has is that the wage scales are set by the employees/owners at each company. So you never get the bit were CEO's end up getting paid hundreds of times more than their lowest employees, which is one of the main problems that Occupy has with Wall St.
As for the arguments about attracting the best people to run the company? I'd say it all depends on how you define the best. If you're looking for people who will make the most money no matter what, then yeah, go find yourself a schmoozy MBA.  Mondragon though, has a bunch of codes of practice which basically entail not shitting all over everyone to make money.

"Co-operation, acting as owners and protagonists; Participation, which takes shape as a commitment to management; Social Responsibility, by means of the distribution of wealth based on solidarity; and Innovation, focusing on constant renewal in all areas"

I'd rather work for slightly less money for a bunch company that stood by those values (especially if I was a shareholder), than someone who uses money as the primary measure of what is worthwhile in life. Capitalism isn't inherently unworkable, we just haven't got it right yet.

A new parasite?

I can't find the link, I can't even recall where I saw it, but I do recall somone making the claim a few weeks ago that evolutionary theory could be applied to everything - not just biology. It's a big call, it's plausible (I think) but it's not one I'd fully endorse until I see some substantial evidence for. Having said that, here's a commentary from George Monbiot that's not inconsistent with the idea.

It draws from the work of Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize winner for economics in 2002) in which he showed that there's a self-attribution fallacy rife amongst our financial classes. i.e those who have succeded attribute it to skill on their part when if you look the industry over time, there stands a very good chance they would have done just as well by flipping coins. In other words, they are lucky, not special.

The other work it draws on is Psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, who tested senior execs in british firrms, looking for evidence of psychopathy. It's not universal but there's a fair whack of it there. These managers are very good at flattery, exploiting others at the same time as not really caring about them. Monbiot sums it up quite well

"if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school."

Consistent with evolutionary theory? On the surface of it, I'd say yes, it could be viewed that way. Certain traits are selected for (psychopathy), which allow some to succeed though there's a fair amount of chance involved. I'd liken it to the evolution of an (economic) parasitic organism, feeding off the general population, the 1% vs 99% so to speak. The thing with parasites though is that when they start to harm the host, the host either dies or fights back until some balance point is reached. Or lives on, crippled in misery I suppose.

And now - extreme smiling and waving!

Has anyone else noticed that Key never actually answers anything? I mean, I've noticed, I'm sure many others have. No one in the media appears to though. The general caricature of him is Mr Smile and wave (which I generally agree with), but I can't recall him actually answering any of criticisms the Labour (and others) have laid at his door over the past few weeks. All he ever says is "person X is dreaming/unrealistic/wrong/will hurt business/random thing", he never actually answers the challenge. I suspect he'll go down in history as the man who took smiling and waving to a whole new level of smiling and waving. <random depressing comment about our 4th estate and politicians>. <sigh>.

Well it appears to be working.

Argentina. 10 years ago, as I understand it, it was a bit of a basket case, economically speaking. Now, not so much. Aha! I hear you say, another victory for unencumbered invisible hand of the free market and the Chicago school of economics. Again not so much. As with most articles from Salon, it's worth looking at this one critically (they have their biases), but it's worth a look.
Not so much on this blog, I often lament the lack of evidence based policy enacted by our governments. Admittedly, with economics, it's a hard thing to do given that on the country scale, economics systems exist within a large dynamic global economic system, so it's hard to isolate pieces of economic policy and determine their effect. When you're talking about broad school of though though, we can look at economies that approach either end of the spectrum and start making some general assumption. The spectrum I am talking about here, for the record is the highly regulated government controlled economy versus the completely unregulated free market approach. It's very rare that an economy actually reaches either end of the scale though the ones that are highly government controlled tend to military controlled and somewhat hopeless. Approaching the other end, the less regulation you get, the more emphasis is placed on the free market, the more inequality you get.
Presuming you're gunning for an economy that provides everyone with a baseline standard of living and that the Argentinian story over the past decade is a reasonable case study, then it would appear that what we want is not tight government control, nor overly loose control, but a moderate level of control. Their top 10% only owns 34% of the wealth rather than more than 40%. At the same time they've seen poverty rates drop form ~20% to 2.4%, which is spectacular. Salaries have grown with inflation and social spending increased.
This is not to say that everything is rosy. It's not, they've still got problems, government is always a balancing act though, like sailing a boat, you never get to take you hand off the rudder and say it'll be fine now. The idea that markets the less regulation a market has the better it will be for everyone is getting harder and harder to sell to the general population, which is as it should be, given it's failures over the past few decades. It would be nice if those trying to sell it would stop and look at countries that aren't toeing the line though. Figure out why they are working and push those policies rather than clinging to ideologies that don't work.

Sherlock Holmes - Bayesian styles.

Nothing new or overly idiotic from the politicians today so we can look at something fun. This is where large chunks of the people who know me stop reading.
One of the things that I am going to be doing over the next year or so is constructing Bayesian models of gene regulatory networks. Thomas Bayes was a English chap who did everyone a favour and did some very serious thinking about probabilities back in the 1700's. Everyone is, I presume familiar with the idea that if you roll a dice there's a 1 in 6 chance that you'll get a six. If you roll two (non loaded die) then there's a 1 in 36 chance you'll get 2 sixes. You can just multiply the probabilities of the two events together because they're independent. What happens if your two events are conditional though? That is to say, the outcome of the second event is affected by the outcome of the first event? This is what Bayes worked out, how to compute the probability of an event given the probability of second event.

Basically, this says the probability of event A happening, given that event B happens is the probability the B happening provided A happens, times the probability of A happening divided by the probability of B happening. Doesn't sound immediately intuitive, but if we rearrange it slightly you'll see that we get:

Which, if you think about it, describes a pretty basic Venn diagram.

 The probability of A happening is the whole circle. The probability of B happening provided A happens is the intersection of the two circles. It's quite simple in the when you look at it that way. I'll be take the expression profiles of genes and using them as A's and B's. Which, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, will be fun.

So where does Sherlock come in to all this? We (as in humans) are very good at logical fallacies. Not figuring them out, making them I mean. Scientific American had a post a few days ago describing one. Given a description of someone and the a choice of possible occupations, people most often choose statements with two occupations in them, i.e. this person is a musician and an architect rather than just a musician or just an architect. When if you think about it, if being a musician is A and an architect is B, then the chance of being both, is significantly smaller than just A or just B. i.e. not all musicians are architects nor all architects musicians. With Bayes's formula, we can work out those probabilities if we wanted to, which would just show us how wrong we can be. Sherlock didn't make that mistake. And we all know how clever he was.

Look at the slighly bigger picture.

Sciblogs.co.nz has two stories at the moment which fit together quite nicely. One that came through this morning was on coffee and cancer. There was an article in the Christchurch press touting coffee as a beneficial in preventing skin cancer. Which is all well and good, but coffee also contains known carcinogens. So which is it, good or bad? The answer is a common one - it depends. There's a variety of factors that are in play such as the levels of good stuff/bad stuff, and the fact that cancer is a single disease (something that needs to be stressed more often), it's an umbrella term for a diverse bunch of disorders that create similar effects (death) via a variety of mechanisims.

The point being, that when an article comes along that says "Yay! this thing stops cancer", it pays to remember that it's never quite that simple. Which is a point made in this post. Basically, you should trust the science rather than the scientist. Take coffee for example, one study comes out and says it's good, another says it's bad. it's not a good idea to rely on the latest study, different scientists are looking at similar things for different reasons. Before you run out and start overdosing on coffee though, you need to look at the science. Look at as many studies as you can find - how many are bad? how bad is it under what circumstances. What benefits does it give you? then you get to make a judgement call (which of course benefits+taste >> drawbacks)

Most of this is missed when the latest next best thing gets reported. Which is bad becuase if you only pay attention to the latest publicized result, it can lead to people actually thinking scientists are debating whether global warming exists. the odd scientist is claiming that it doesn't, but the science as a whole amkes it painfully clear that it is happening and we've probably underestimated it so far. Or that there is a cure for cancer just around the corner - there isn't, we've got promising treatments for some cancers and have identified numerous risk factors but we're a long way from figuring all out how to solve all cancers. These things become evident when the science is considered but can easily become hidden or confused when individual reports are relied upon.

More numbers.

So a couple of days ago we had the numbers from the budget detailing the split of the Ministry of Social Development's spend on welfare. From a total budget of 23 billion, we had 4.4% on the unemployment benefit, 3.4% on the sickness benefit, 5.8 on the invalids benefit and 8.2 on the DPB. As best as I can tell, these are the benefits that are National proposes scrapping and turning into 3 new benefits. That totals 21.8% of the welfare spend. which comes to roughly 5 billion dollars.

Apparently, ditching the old and creating the new benefits will save 1 billion over 4 years. I'm presuming that that means 250 million a year on average rather than 1 billion a year. 250 million a year, out of a spend of 5 billion dollars gives us roughly, a 4% savings. The full benefit is currently about $230 a week. 4% of that being, 9 dollars. That, to a beneficiary, will make a lot more difference than you think, 2-3 meals a week. More problematic I think, is the putting everyone on the sickness benefit into the job seeker benefit. There's plenty of jobs about if you're a java programmer with 6 years experience. Most people aren't though. And there's not enough jobs there for the unemployed, let alone jobs that will be able to cater to the needs of those currently unsuited to full time labour.

In short, as best I can tell, it's a rearranging the deck chairs, the primary purpose being to use the unemployed as a boogie man to wave in front of the voters to distract them from the fact that jobs are not plentiful.

Stoke IPA

Every man and his dog has an IPA out these days. I really wish brewers would put more effort into making a decent lager. Tuatara Helles is still the only really good lager in the country that I'm aware of. anyway, Stoke have recently put out their IPA. And while I'm normally a fan of Stoke, - their Stoke gold is one of the best beers around for the price, Stoke Dark is growing on me and their Rochdale Cider is a step or 3 above most other ciders in NZ, I have to say, of their IPA, I am not a fan. Heavy on bitterness, low on flavour. Then again, it may grow on me, we shall see.

GE for the win.

Okay, technically I'm probably calling this one as a win to early - it hasn't been tested on human's yet. In Nature, we have an article on a group from China that have made transgenic rice that produces human serum albumin, a protein out of out blood. At the moment it's mostly taken from blood donations. So having a supply that we can literally grow is going to break open a supply bottle neck. It has a variety of uses and one of it's big plusses will be infection free. It's only been tested on mice so far, but it appears to be chemically identical to naturally derived human serum albumin so far. Fingers crossed.

Even if it doesn't work, it's still a win though. Just the fact that we are thinking about doing stuff like this is incredibly cool. And there's cooler stuff yet to come.